There was no splat of impact. In fact he couldn’t quite pinpoint when the falling sensation ended, only that the endless whiteness had given way to a landscape infinitely worse, a tapestry of red. The heat more than oppressive, eighteen notches above unbearable. It was a living thing, worming its way through his body and searing him. Sulphur stung his eyes until they were next to useless, and even using his synaesthesia to change the nature of things couldn’t fully clear the effect – whether it was because he wasn’t powerful enough, or because he couldn’t focus his talents, he wasn’t sure. He was even less sure that he wanted to see properly.
‘Carman of Athens …’ a voice from the depths rumbled. His first instinct was to look for its source. Thankfully, his mind intervened and prevented him.
The witch-queen was begging, fumbling, repeating, ‘My Lord,’ over and over.
‘Welcome home,’ the voice said.
She was gone from beside him. If he had strained, he may have heard a sound that was halfway between a splinter and a splash. He didn’t strain.
There was something in front of him. The voice’s owner had risen from below. Danny couldn’t look away. Even with his synaesthesia firing, he could only discern parts of the whole. His eyes wouldn’t close, no matter how hard he tried. Nothing was working anymore. He felt like a full stop that had found itself staring at War and Peace.
‘You …’ the voice said, and even hearing the word almost drove Danny out of his mind. This was it. He was about to die at the whim of this awakening behemoth.
But before that unmentionable beast could utter another sound, something cool wrapped around his hand and pulled, and he felt a sensation of rising that was every bit the equal of the falling he’d just experienced.
‘Trust me when I tell you this,’ the Morrigan said, glorious in her goddess guise once more. ‘Do not look down.’
WASHINGTON DC, NOW
Those assembled in the room watched the computer track the progress of the airburst nuclear warheads, designed to detonate a quarter-mile above ground level for maximum dispersal, as they arced into the Earth’s atmosphere and then descended.
Olympus was still rising. It was now the highest mountain outside the Himalayas. The seismic shift caused by its elevation was devastating the Greek lowlands, causing a tsunami to race across the relatively narrow expanse of the Mediterranean and smash into North Africa.
A massive super storm was raging at the rising summit of the impossible mountain. From space, the size and colour of the storm front looked like something lifted from the atmosphere of Jupiter or Saturn, entirely out of place on planet Earth. Gargantuan flashes of lightning peppered the storm, illuminating its ferocity from within, lancing out and connecting earth and heaven in massive river deltas written in pure light.
‘Impact in thirty seconds.’
LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST ABOVE, NOW
Danny burst through the door onto the roof of Lircom Tower. Above their heads, streaking across the skies, they could see it; a tiny contrail of white about to become an annihilation blast that would wipe the city clean of all life.
Not if the goddess beside him had anything to do with it. The Morrigan was restored, tall and shining, beautiful and invincible. The Sword was gone – she was the weapon now, he knew. She seemed to pulse, a silver heartbeat reverberating through her, from her.
Time seemed to slow and shrink until all that he could see was the goddess and the white streak descending from the heavens. Nothing else.
‘Thank you,’ he told her, knowing this was it. ‘You brought me through hell.’
‘Hades, to be precise,’ she corrected him, smiling. ‘Thank you, Danny. It had been a few thousand years since I’d been human and I had forgotten what it really meant. Then you showed up and you were human enough for the both of us.’
‘What happened to her? To Carman?’ Danny asked.
The Morrigan smiled, not pleasantly. ‘She got her wish. She finally got noticed.’
‘Is this really it?’ he asked her. ‘Is this how it all ends?’
She nodded towards the warhead falling in bullet-time. ‘Remember when Carman said the power lay within her to stop them?’ she said, and tapped herself on the chest. ‘She was talking about me. I can do this. After all …’ and she smiled and bared her teeth proudly, addressing the whole world, ‘I am the Goddess of fucking War.’
‘You can stop nukes?’ Danny said, hardly daring to hope.
‘What is magic but turning one thing into another?’ she said. ‘When they explode, when their power is released, I will change it. Destruction will become creation. You’ll see, Danny. I promise.’
‘Simple as that?’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘No, not quite. Converting this much raw energy … I don’t know what it will do to me. I’ll probably be scattered beyond even my people’s ability to regenerate. But who knows? Perhaps this will be a new beginning for me as well. I believe … I believe I could use one,’ and she kissed him, on the cheek.
‘Follow your heart, Danny Morrigan,’ she told him. ‘Don’t take the long way around.’
She changed her shape to that of a bird for the last time, if you could call the dragon-sized, jet-black magnificent creature hovering there something as mundane as a bird. He knew at that moment, for the first time, he was seeing her as she would have appeared on the battlefield in her prime. The omen of victory.
‘Go as the crow flies,’ she said.
With that, she took off like a bullet in an unerringly straight line toward the falling missiles. There was a flash as the nearest warhead detonated, and a blindingly brilliant tendril of nuclear fire was birthed into the world.
THE FUTURE
The little girl woke up, just for an instant. ‘Oh,’ was all she said, and her eyes closed once more.
‘She knows,’ her mother said.
LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST ABOVE, NOW
Danny risked opening his eyes. When he’d felt that incredible flash of light wash over him, bright enough that he could see his very bones through his skin, he’d expected to feel the wave of heat and the crushing kiss of oblivion. Neither had materialised. Belfast was still standing – bathed in glorious, undiluted light.
The blast had been frozen. A second sun, suspended high in the skies above Belfast, was blazing with ferocious intensity. Toward the horizon, in every direction, he could see a third, a fourth, a fifth – a suspended daisy-chain of obviated oblivion, a string of nuclear pearls.
Doomsday had been aborted.
*
It was the same all over Ireland.
The warheads detonated successfully, every single one of the two hundred and seventeen launched achieved nuclear fission reaction a quarter-mile above ground level.
A nanosecond after detonation, in the light of the blinding flash produced on detonation, every single one of those explosions was frozen in place, pinned to the sky like a butterfly in a collector’s album.
Every one of the country’s incredulous population found themselves bathed under a string of blinding flares of light popping in the skies above, as though the Milky Way had turned into a camera lens and was taking a photo of all of existence, with Ireland as its flashbulb.
And how it shone.
The flares did not fade away. Two hundred and seventeen suns now burned in Ireland’s skies. It looked like Tatooine’s wet dream. All over, people emerged from their homes, blinking in disbelief. The light should have fried them in place a hundred times over, cast nothing but human-shaped shadows onto a ruined ground. Blast waves should have knocked over buildings like matchsticks and seared mountainsides and valleys clean.
None of that happened.
The light from above felt warm, and it was hard to stare at those sources of light, much as one could not stare directly at the sun, but that was it. That was all.
On the roof of Lircom Tower, Danny Morrigan sat down on the hard concrete and did something he hadn’t done since he was a small boy.
&nbs
p; He prayed his thanks.
LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST ABOVE, TWO WEEKS PD (POST DETONATION)
Danny looked into the sea of camera lenses and microphones, shielding his eyes from the camera flashes. He was a spokesperson. Time to start acting like one.
‘My name is Danny Morrigan, Director of Communications at Lircom. Thank you all for coming along. I’m sure you must all be grateful for a news story, God knows it’s been kind of quiet out there.’
A slight ripple of laughter passed through the throng. The past fortnight had been anything but quiet. The highest mountain on the planet now belonged to Greece, not to Tibet. The seismic upheavals that had accompanied this shift had had devastating consequences for the entire eastern Mediterranean, although – and nobody quite knew how – human casualties had been spectacularly low.
Prayers had been answered.
Satellites trying to peer through the lightning storm surrounding the summit had been swatted from orbit by targeted electrical bursts, directed – some were muttering the word thrown – with pinpoint accuracy.
The complete nuclear annihilation of Ireland had been averted. A second wave of missiles had, of course, immediately been triggered but these missiles never got beyond their launch pads. Mysterious, unstoppable system failures were plaguing every weapon of mass destruction on planet Earth.
HARRISON STREET, BELFAST BELOW, TWO WEEKS PD
In a huge and empty house on one of the poshest roads in Belfast, a house they’d laid claim to ten days previously and which they were starting to furnish, Steve lay with Maggie in a post-coital tangle of arms and legs.
Though they were already pressed together, Maggie cuddled herself closer and Steve moved his limbs slightly to allow her to do so. It was dark outside, as it always was in this world, but in his heart, all he felt was a contentment that he hadn’t felt in so long.
Maggie was quiet. The sex had been good and the orgasm had made her feel something other than despair. Now, afterward, she could feel the darkness outside pressing inward once more.
The loneliness, the knowledge that she was shut off from the rest of the world, everything she’d ever known, reached out, and the only thing she could think of to do was to worm closer to Steve’s sweat-soaked skin.
I wanted this, she thought. I stayed here. I must have wanted this.
It was warm in bed and the bedroom was brightly lit, but in her heart, all she felt was cold and empty.
LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST ABOVE, TWO WEEKS PD
‘Lircom will be able to use our state of the art communications network to do something unprecedented. Something the whole of this island is crying out for.’
Danny paused. Dother was watching from the sidelines.
‘We’re going to give people here the ability, through the phones, through text messages, through the Internet even, to get back in touch with the loved ones they lost.’
He licked his lips, knowing what he was about to say would change the world all over again. ‘We can bridge the gap between the Ireland Above and the Ireland Below. We will work to bring them both back together.’
The rest of his speech was drowned out completely by the uproar that ensued.
REGENT STREET, BELFAST ABOVE, TWO WEEKS PD
‘Here comes the big aeroplane!’
‘Pbbbbt,’ said Luke, blowing a disgusted raspberry.
‘Here it comes!’
‘Pbbt!’
Another globule of baby muck came dribbling out of his mouth. He fixed Danny with a look and then chuckled delightedly at his own wit, grabbing for the food pot and his own ear simultaneously.
‘Fuck the big aeroplane?’ Danny said.
Luke laughed. Danny plucked him from the high chair in one motion and deposited him flat on his back on the sofa and proceeded to tickle his belly until the baby was gasping for air from laughing. After that he was dropped into his Doctor Who walker and he was off, happily pinballing around the living room and hitting the buttons to make Dalek noises, much to his apparent confusion.
Watching him, Danny had to fight the urge to pluck him out and gather him back up. Working with Dother these past few weeks had not been easy. He had been at great pains to point out that he had helped Danny considerably. His depth of knowledge and his power made him an impossible ally to refuse, particularly if Danny ever wanted to get in contact with his father and Steve again. Carman may have been able to open portals with a wave of her hand, but Danny was nowhere near that league, and if Dother was, he wasn’t telling.
Telling Ellie that he had taken a job working with the man who had run her father through with a sword had been … an experience.
It was more than that, though.
In the stone circle, when she’d charged at Carman in the throes of a berserker rage, Danny had pinned her with his mind. The move had probably saved her life, but she’d made him promise never to do that to her again. He’d broken that promise in Dother’s office.
Danny went into the kitchen to find Ellie there, with her scented washing-up liquid out from under the sink. She wasn’t actually doing the dishes, of course, she was doing the puzzle word in Take A Break, but she had all the equipment ready, and that was the main thing.
He kissed her and felt it again, that half-second of hesitation.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said for the hundredth time.
‘You don’t need to keep saying that.’
‘Yes I do,’ he sighed. ‘Ellie, it was all an act. You know that. I hadn’t time to explain anything and even if I had, there’s a chance she could have read both of our minds. I realised what it meant, what I had to do, and I had about two nanoseconds to make a decision and I made it. I’d never hurt Luke. I’d never give him up. Never.’
‘When she remade the world for us, you had given him up.’
‘That wasn’t my wish, remember?’ he said pointedly.
‘Neither was having him in the first place.’
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘But it wasn’t yours, either. When we were in that stone circle and Carman showed us our past, I was ashamed of myself – not for the thoughts I’d had back then, but because I’d never really taken the time to think what it was like for you. You were going to look after Luke no matter what choice I made and you stood to sacrifice just as much as me, and yet I was one acting like a spoiled dick.’
‘I thought you were building up the courage to leave me,’ Ellie said quietly. ‘When you left for work that day, the day it all began, I needed to know. I was going to ask you–’
Danny kissed her then, impulsively, out of a sudden need. She didn’t turn away and there was no hesitation in the kiss this time, but when it broke she looked up at him, still troubled.
‘I won’t–’
‘Shut up,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘Don’t say what’ll never happen, Danny. If the past few days have shown anything it’s that nothing can be ruled out. I can’t promise anything any more than you can, so please don’t.’
‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘You’re wrong, Ellie. I love Luke, and I’m in love with you. I know both of those things are true right at this moment. I know I want to stay with you. I know making things work with you took effort and will continue to take effort, but it doesn’t feel like work. But if it ever does, and I can’t promise it won’t …’ he took a deep breath. ‘I promise to try, Ellie. I promise I’ll never just walk away.’
He thought of a hundred other things to say and a hundred other questions he could ask, but he dismissed them all and held her close, knowing he’d made the right choice.
‘So much has happened,’ she said. ‘Part of me wishes we could just …’
‘Hit a big reset button and go back to before?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I mean, how are we supposed to process any of this? Magic is real? Not only that but the world knows it is. There’s been so much damage – Ireland and Greece shut off from the rest of Europe, no-one knows what’s happening in India and Norway and Australia. It’s like it’s a whole differen
t world now. We’ve seen our son all grown up and now he’s a baby again and you, me, him … all of us are caught up in this in ways I don’t fully understand and I’m not even sure I want to. I don’t know what sort of world this is any more and I’m scared of what that means for me, Danny. Not to be selfish about it or anything, but what does it mean for us and for …’ she waved into the living room where Luke was, from the sounds of it, busily trying to EX-TER-MIN-ATE one of their walls.
‘Do you love me?’ he asked her, and then shook his head as he saw her start to mull it over. ‘No, no, no. Don’t think about it, just answer the question with the first answer that pops into your head.’
There was a pause.
‘Well?’ he said, sounding slightly worried.
She laughed. ‘Well I had all that time you were talking about saying the first thing that pops into my head to think about it. So it’s not really gonna work any more, is it?’
With a tiny amount of trial and a frankly ridiculous amount of error, Luke had emerged from the living room in his walker. He bumped into his old nemesis the kitchen baby-gate and squealed at it by way of greeting before beginning to plot its fiery destruction.
‘True,’ Danny allowed, inclining his head at her. ‘If only there was another question you wouldn’t have had time to think about.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Ellie said, putting down her magazine and picking up a pie-encrusted pot to begin washing the dishes. ‘There–’
Crash.
‘–isn’t,’ she finished, staring down at the ring in Danny’s outstretched hand. She jumped into his arms and they danced around their tiny kitchen – a room so small you couldn’t have swung a crow in it.
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